An exercise in SEO

Intro

There were 3 main reasons for re-designing and moving this site over to WordPress…

• To make it easier to keep up-to-date
• Get a more permanent presence on the old internet and replace the temporary portfolio style site, which was just a quick-fix after Christmas
  
• And finally and most importantly, SEO (Search Engine Optimisation for anyone who’s not sure what that means) – To get the site indexed well by Google and bumped up the results pages, getting more and more work directly from people finding my site independently on the internet.

I’m a freelance graphic designer, so it’s all about getting work any way I can, and while doing work for design agency’s in and around Leeds is great, I’d ultimately like to get more work directly and establish my own client base, turning me and my little freelance operation into something larger.

The Task

Currently if I search for something like web design in Leeds, web design Leeds, or 3D visualisation Yorkshire, I’m not coming anywhere near the top of the list – and that’s a bad thing.

Typically a prospective client will search for something and go for the top few links, then maybe scan the first page of results to see if anything else catches their eye.

So, now that I have a decent up-datable site, the goal is to get my site ranked highly for search terms that I think people who need freelance design services like the ones I provide will actually type into Google.

How

From been a web designer for the last 7 years I (hopefully) know enough to make a start on getting my site ranked much higher than it currently is. The main things to concentrate on are…

• Work out what search terms you actually want to appear for at the top of the list.
• Relevant good content is key to it all – write good content to the subject you’d like to rank highly for and the visitors will, in time, start coming.
• So, if I want want my site to start ranking highly for terms like freelance web design Leeds or freelance photography Leeds then I need to actually use those phrases or variations on them (it’s almost as if this whole article is just part of my plan) on my site – although not excessively else you’ll get ranked down for trying to spam your way to the top of the list.
• Write good content in this blog section of my site so that people link to it (don’t worry, I’m not under any illusions this is good content just yet – I can design and take photos but I tend to waffle on a bit instead of getting to the point when writing – maybe I’ll write a novel one day, can’t be that hard can it?) and just generally try to get people linking to me site.  The more people Google sees linking to me, the higher the ‘authority’ it’ll give my site, and will therefore hopefully show my site above someone elses, who has for example exactly the same content but a lower authority according to their ranking system. This, and it’s a dark art in it’s self, is called Page Rank.
• Make sure the Titles of my pages contain some useful keywords and phrases (but not a list of keywords like the Meta tag – see below), but still remain descriptive and readable for the user.
• Meta keywords, as far as I can tell, are pretty much ignored by Google and a lot of other search engines these days. While it’s still good to have them the engines these days take a much closer look at the actual content of the pages to index them and, not the Meta tags. Instead of making sure you’ve got a nice list of Meta Keywords, make sure you use all the key-words and key-phrases you want to get indexed for in the content of your site instead, like 3D design in Leeds. See, easy. (sorry, couldn’t resist)
• Be patient, wait for the major search engines to get a good index of your site, and don’t be afraid to change content if the old stuff’s not working

I’ll be keeping this post updated with whatever genuinely useful information I find on this subject but for now I’m just going keep on updating my site, tweaking the keyword content here and there for each of the work pages etc, and keep an eye on my ranking. I’ll let you know if anything starts shifting.